“Ithil konjam kooda nyayamillai” (There is just no justice in this), pleaded Arithra, the 20-year-old daughter of Murugan and Nalini, breaking down during a phone interview from her London home to a Tamil news channel. She begged for mercy for her father who is on death row for involvement in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination.
Arithra grew up without her parents. She last saw them when she was 15, in 1987, after the Madras high court intervened and got an unwilling Indian high commission in Colombo to issue her a visa. “I have missed my parents very much. I grew up worrying a lot about them and somehow carried on in the belief that some day we would be reunited. But now, I am told that this will not happen and I am shattered. This is not fair, this is not justice,” said the young woman, her voice choking with grief.
“I used to get letters regularly from my parents telling me they are living just for me. But now this news is terrible,” said Arithra.
She said she had sent a letter to chief minister Jayalalithaa pleading with her to save her father from the gallows. She was grateful to the many people and organisations campaigning in Tamil Nadu for clemency for her father, she said. She revealed that she had applied for visa at the Indian high commission in London to travel to Chennai to join the campaign against capital punishment.
Nalini was pregnant when she and Murugan were arrested by the CBI’s special investigation team in 1991.